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The tireless work carried out by human beings to learn more about the world around us continues and adds shocking new discoveries. In this case, the collaboration between astronomers from the United States and Spain has led to an authentic discovery: ice in a Sun-like star which, according to the data revealed, is barely in its infancy.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has been used to glimpse the light emanating from a disk of debris, dust and rocks orbiting HD 181327, a star 155 light-years away with characteristics very similar to those of the Sun in our system. This study, which was published just a few days ago in the journal Nature, is signed by Spaniard Noemi Pinilla-Alonso, who is originally from Asturias.
A similar origin to that of the solar system to which the Earth belongs
This expert, together with her team and US collaborators, have detected crystalline water ice inside this debris disk. This, they suggest, demonstrates that the events that occurred 4 billion years ago in our system may well have happened in others. At that time, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune changed their orbits and, in doing so, caused all kinds of asteroids, comets and other objects to impact on the Earth, the Moon and other planets.
The age of this 'young' Sun is 23 million years, a relatively short period compared to the 4.6 billion years of the Sun around which the Earth orbits. The experts in charge of this research suspect that the bodies around the ring collide with each other and, in the future, could well give rise to new planets. In addition, both carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide have been detected.